[About the above video - please watch it before youread on] My latest comparative film study*[...] involves a
moment of recognition through a return to [a] personally charged film,
indeed to two personally charged films: Vertigo, a favourite Hitchcock
film, and Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner,
1980) which I remember seeing in the cinema with my family three years before I
was told that the father who had raised me was not my biological parent. I
hadn’t really been aware of any specific aesthetic resemblance between the two
films. But they were already connected for me: I had written about both of them
at Anagnorisis, one of my research blogs in which, for probably obvious
personal, as well as academic, reasons, I had set out to explore the cultural
theme and scene of dramatic moments of recognition or personal discovery,
moments that Hitchcock and Kershner’s films share.**
I became aware of the deeper similarities and inverted echoes only recently,
after seeing thumbnail images from the chosen sequences juxtaposed in my video
editor project library. And — yes — the exploration that followed prompted some
dizzying moments of recognition. In order to showcase this discovery to best
effect, I opted [...] for equally sized, horizontally arranged, split screens,
but I altered or muted most of the audio track from Vertigo — until the
final sting. More importantly, I also slowed the Vertigo sequence — from
its original duration of 1:28.5 to 2:35.8 — in order to create the particular
synchronous flow that I felt worked best for this, at times very striking,
comparison. [Read more]

The intertext constitutes meaning as the work involved in seeking it.1

By the combination of two “depictables” is achieved the representation of something that is graphically undepictable […].

But this is -- montage!

Yes. It is exactly what we do in the cinema […].2

[T]he film essay enables the filmmaker to make the “invisible” world of
thoughts and ideas visible on the screen. Unlike the documentary film
that presents facts and information, the essay film produces complex
thought—reflections that are not necessarily bound to reality, but can
also be contradictory, irrational, and fantastic.3

We [film critics and scholars] can now “write” using the very materials
that constitute our object of study: moving images and sounds. But doing
this demands re-thinking conventional critical forms. Lots of
experimenting must be done [...].4

What has always interested me most in film studies is the exploration of
what Gérard Genette called “transtextuality,” that is to say, the range
of ways in which one film may be brought into relation, whether
manifest or hidden, with other films [5].
Sometimes this interest has alighted on matters of cultural influence and film authorship [6].But, often, my work has addressed the recognition of
cinematic interconnectedness, within the specific fields of transtextuality that
Genette called “hypertextuality” and “intertextuality.”[7] The latter is also the term that Russian writer Mikhail
Iampolski used for his complex explorations of sometimes unlikely, or
“anomalous,” figurative connections between films in his 1998 book The Memory
of Tiresias [8].

Intertextuality” as Iampolski sees it is an especially helpful concept in
working through the many conscious and unconscious processes by which “sources”
— other texts or films — are used by filmmakers, as well as the intricacies of
the chains of associations that come to produce the energy and force of
individual films for spectators [9]. As Helen Grace writes of his work,

[intertextuality] understands the relation between
the text and its precursor less in a hierarchical sense and more as an
exchange, which adds to both text and source and so it breaks out of the
logic of “original versus copy,” which has dominated much of the
discussion of this problem […]. [10]

As Iampolski himself puts it, “the intertextual field of certain texts
can be composed of ‘sources’ that were actually written after them.”

By inserting the “source” of a cinematic figure
into a film as its subtext, the intertext can also function as a generative
mechanism. This also implies a new approach to
cinematic language, one distinct from traditional semiotic analysis, which
normally limits its reading of a figure to the confines of a given film (or
group of films). [11]

Iampolski wasn’t writing about literal forms of “insertion,” of course, but about a process of intertextually motivated reading [12].
At the time his book was published, experiments with digital forms of
textuality, or with academic audiovisual “quotation,” were still in
their relative infancy. But a decade and a half later, in an age of
increasing digital and multimedia scholarship, indeed, of “expanded film
studies,”[13] how better to explore filmic connections and ‘insertions’ of different
kinds than to take Iampolski at his word, and experiment with working
them through generatively and
practically, in this way?

Christian Keathley, Comment on “Close Up: The Movie/Essay/Dream,” Scanners,
October 17, 2007.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2007/10/close_up_the_movie_essay.html.
Last accessed May, 7, 2012. I’d like to register here my warm thanks to Chris
for his wonderful contributions to our on-going dialogue about video essays, as
well as for the inspiration of his own pioneering work in this field.

Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: Literature in the
Second Degree (Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press,1992) 83-84.